I completely agree there are plenty of other services, some of which have better maps, some of which have better satellite coverage.
Google Maps' big advantage is the interface. While not quite as good as Map24's (which "cheats" by being a Java applet), the way you can drag image around the viewpane makes it a way more intuitive experience that most HTML based map/satellite explorers.
Here's hoping the satellite pictures continue to improve, and they eventually manage to iron our the issues with maps (no scale; road names often out of view; etc.)
But what can you expect from a mapping system that has taken lat/long N 38.35 / W 98.5 as the center of the world. This is not a joke, Wacoma Lake in Kansas is the origin (x=0, y=0) of Google's mapping system. Even the maps of the UK are relative to that coordinate system.
I think you're misinterpreting the URL format. The "spn=" values are for zoom level. "ll=" values are latitude and longitude in decimal.
Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
Within the last month, I've been stung by exactly such race conditions -- but we found that it was only possible to double-submit a form in IE. In Firefox the second click was ignored.
And yes, by the way, I can just use whatever crap my mobo manufacturer put on it in OSX. I don't even know what kind of soundcard in in my Mac. And I don't care. And this is how it should be.... but you know for sure that whatever it is, it's supported by OS X, because Apple built the box.
If you were to buy a box that was built expressly for Linux -- and assuming the builders are doing a decent job -- then you could expect the same thing.
Now the next big problem that needs resolution. A reasonable way to handle printers.
For some reason I very seldom print -- I've given up on my inkjet because the heads invariably dry out in the months between my needing to print -- and for this reason it's a very long time since I've configured a printer under Linux, back in the days when tinkering with lpr was pretty representative of the whole Linux experience.
I understand that lpr has been dropped for CUPS. Isn't CUPS also used in OS X -- indicating that at least one corporation widely considered to have cracked ease of use, thinks it's good enough.
Apple is certainly/a/ Dark Side. I recently bought a Mac Mini to reaquaint myself with what Apple has to offer. I knew at the time that at the end of the day Apple's number one commitment is to it's shareholders, but blimey the OS X/iLife experience is just so commercial.
It's as if you can't open a menu without a "BUY ITUNES MUSIC" or "BUY GARAGEBAND ACCESSORIES" options being thrust in your face. You can't move for invitations to pay stump up more cash for.Mac. Your USB webcam doesn't work? Why not buy an iSight?
After years as primarily a Linux user, it's quite a shock to the system moving into an environment where I'm constantly being reminded of my status as a consumer.
Just buy a damn mouse already if you want the extra buttons, I'm currently writing this from a mac with a 4 button scroll wheel mouse *gasp!!* and it works just peachy.
It depends on the application. Try using the right button in GarageBand, for example: it does precisely nothing -- even in places where Command-click does something special. I find it pretty frustrating.
It's nice that the OS recognises multi-button mice, but since developers must support users with only one button, it seems pretty arbitrary as to what scraps they throw to users with a grown-up's mouse.
The average consumer is a moron and probably shouldn't be allowed to own a "complex" device which doesn't provide them with simple pictures to show them how to perform such difficult tasks as opening a case and replacing a battery that is as simple to replace as it is to replace a battery in a cordless phone.
If you didn't know how to swim, then you shouldn't have gone in the water in the first place!
You're as mad as a hatter -- or a troll.
An iPod is not marketed as a device for geeks. It's actively advertised as something non-technical for everyone.
One of the biggest thrills of F1 is the unbelievable amount of noise those cars make. How dull would it be if they were silent?
I went go-karting at a track with electric cars (this one) the other week.
At first the quietness felt really weird, but those things went faster than any karts I've been in before, and had awesome acceleration. To hear the air rushing through your helmet (rather than the roar of the engine) is quite something. Of course, the squealing of brakes and of tyres is unaffected.
The OS knows which button you've pressed, but application support for the right/middle button is patchy, because developers have to assume the user may have a single button mouse.
In Garageband, one might expect right-clicking a track to bring up a context menu (duplicating some of the options in the "Track" menu). One might expect right-clicking on a loop to do something similar. Instead, right clicking either does precisely nothing.
In iPhoto, right-clicks do what someone used to context menus might expect.
In Mac Firefox, the middle button doesn't open-in-new-tab, like it does on other platforms (yet on Safari it does).
I recently bought a BenQ wireless keyboard/mouse set, and all in all I'm very pleased with it. We have a very small home office area, with a small desk, and having a wireless keyboard/mouse makes it very easy to tidy off the desk in order to do non-computing work (my S.O. does a lot of paper-heavy exam marking work).
I've not encountered any problems, although playing with GarageBand, I've noticed some latency when using the keyboard as a music keyboard -- so it's probably not too good for games either. Neither of these is a big deal for me, and for typing and general computer use it's fine.
iPodder (currently what one might describe as a "reference implementation" of a podcast client) already supports torrents as RSS enclosures.
My guess is that most podcasters don't use it because of the massive number of potential downloaders for whom bittorrent might not work because of office firewalls, home NAT routers, etc.
Other options: archive.org will host your Creative Commons media for free; using a Coral cache may reduce your bandwidth usage.
I'm not sure I get it either. When do I listen to audio-only entertainment? Either when I'm in the car or at work. At work, I need music, not news or verbal entertainment. In the car, I have a sirius radio, which is commercial free. I have quite a few channels to listen to and I enjoy being programmed to so I can find out new things without customizing my entire life's intake. At home, I just can't see taking time out for audio content.
Newsflash! Not everyone is like you. "The world don't dance to the beat of just one drum", and thank God for that.
I hate to carp on about the BBC's podcasts, but these are programmes I used to enjoy listening to, but rarely got around to because I either had to be by a Internet connected computer (to stream an archive), or use traditional radio and be tied to a specific time. Now I get the content delivered to my portable player with no fuss, and that's great. Sorry, but pasting a URL into a podcast client is way more convenient than messing around with Streamripper.
And, if you can find it, there are some gems in the amateur content too.
But, if it's not for you, that's fine. Go ahead and enjoy your music, your TV and your games. Just as I'm allowed to "not get" Halo and OOP, you're allowed to "not get" Podcasting. It doesn't mean all three of those things aren't huge.
A lot of posts seem to be deriding podcasting as being purely the audio equivalent of a personal blog. While there are certainly plenty of such podcasts, there's plenty of professionally produced material (the BBC output is just one example), and enough high-quality amateur stuff to fill the average person's commute.
The problem is the same problem mp3.com had (and Creative Commons/etc. music still has) -- when you've got a massive morass of mixed quality media, how is the consumer supposed to know what to try out and what to skip? With text you can skim-read, and sort that way. With audio, the selective process is more time consuming and pretty much impractical.
iPodder.org has a directory which has exactly the same problem as mp3.com. PodcastAlley tries to solve this by collating votes, but this just ends up promoting an "elite" of mainstream content, which only helps the mainstream consumer.
I don't know how to solve this, but there there is some promise: Adam Curry's show contains a lot of promos for other shows, and that's a good way to hear about podcasts you may wish to try out. I guess that's the next best thing to word of mouth.
After all, how do you decide what TV shows to watch? Trailers, reviews in the media, and word-of-mouth, right?
BBC is often hailed as the pinnacle of independent jounralism but I find their broadcasts have a very condescending patronizing bias when they report from "lesser" places such as Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa. Somehow, CBC manages to bring lots of news from all over the world while avoiding that annoying condescending tone that permeates the Beeb.
You don't state that you're Canadian, and your email address isn't public so there's no clues there.
But assuming you are, or at least that you're not English, is it possible you're detecting condescention in the "received pronunciation" English accent, where really there is none?
It's common enough -- no wonder Englishmen are so often cast as villains in Hollywood films.
While I'm sure these are terrific shows, it seems a shame that the for the pilot they chose "geek" shows. It's like the profiled the "kind of people who might manage this tricky technology", narrowly profiled their interests, and gave them something targeted to that stereotype.
I love the way the BBC's trial is wide-ranging in the scope of its programming: there's sport, film review, current affairs, history, documentary, as well as science and technology.
By podcasting "In Our Time" (sample topic: Imperialism and Archaeology), the BBC potentially brings tech geeks to history, and history geeks to technology, broadening everyone's horizons.
How much more mac does there need to be in the world?
Podcasting requires neither Mac, iTunes nor iPod.
Any MP3 player will do, and it's in the RSS that the magic lies.
There are key differences between podcasting and archival:
(1) A podcast is not necessarily kept available long term. (2) A podcast is meant to "magically" appear on your portable MP3 player as part of your routine syncing/charging activity.
I don't like the name either -- it wrongly implies reliance on an iPod, and gives Apple free marketing -- but I think we're pretty much stuck with it now.
A cursory browse through the links in the article, and a couple of clicks beyond, does not explain to me how this works.
In the standard Adsense service, one puts a snippet of Javascript in one's pages, which the browser runs to fetch ads. The ads are targetted using what Google knows about the referrer URL, and the browser's IP address.
I don't believe many RSS aggregators will do anything with embedded Javascript in an RSS feed, so how does Google add ads to a feed? Does this only work on feeds hosted by Google?
It's the classic question. [... ] How do you compile "gcc"?
Traditonally one "bootstraps" a compiler with minimal reliance on other tools:
- implement compiler A, providing 1% of language features, in hand-made machine code
- write compiler B, providing 10% of langauge features, using the features provided by compiler B
- use compiler B to compile compiler C, which supports a greater subset of the language
- until finished
OTOH, the GCC install docs do list a C compiler as a prerequisite...
So what's wrong with detecting and prosecuting tax avoiders?
By only beef with the TV license situation is that alongside much excellent output, the BBC seems to spend an inordinate amount of time broadcasting either fluff or blatant promotional stuff for commercial pop music.
Given the BBC's previous experiments with transmissions in OGG format, and their continued development of a video codec free of patent encumberances, I'd be very surprised if it was Windows only.
Those Ogg trials were abandoned and the BBC continues to use Real as it's primary audio distribution method.
OTOH, the podcasting experiment, using MP3s and RSS at least show willing.
I was disappointed at first to see that the BBC is implementing DRM but it's worth bearing in mind that not all the content broadcast by the BBC is owned by them. Much of it comes from independent studios who license it to the BBC. So I remain hopeful that the BBC will offer its own copyrighted material to UK license payers on more permissive terms.
The BBC makes a lot of money from DVD/Video sales, as well as selling content internationally.
I expect the BBC will be looking to DRM to allow them to run this service without putting either of those two revenue streams in too much peril.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree there are plenty of other services, some of which have better maps, some of which have better satellite coverage.
Google Maps' big advantage is the interface. While not quite as good as Map24's (which "cheats" by being a Java applet), the way you can drag image around the viewpane makes it a way more intuitive experience that most HTML based map/satellite explorers.
Here's hoping the satellite pictures continue to improve, and they eventually manage to iron our the issues with maps (no scale; road names often out of view; etc.)
But what can you expect from a mapping system that has taken lat/long N 38.35 / W 98.5 as the center of the world. This is not a joke, Wacoma Lake in Kansas is the origin (x=0, y=0) of Google's mapping system. Even the maps of the UK are relative to that coordinate system.
I think you're misinterpreting the URL format. The "spn=" values are for zoom level. "ll=" values are latitude and longitude in decimal.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=0,0 centers on the Equator, directly South of Greenwich, just as you would expect.
My gripe with Google Maps is the absence of a scale display (although with that projection, it's not as easy to do as it might initially seem).
Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
Within the last month, I've been stung by exactly such race conditions -- but we found that it was only possible to double-submit a form in IE. In Firefox the second click was ignored.
And yes, by the way, I can just use whatever crap my mobo manufacturer put on it in OSX. I don't even know what kind of soundcard in in my Mac. And I don't care. And this is how it should be. ... but you know for sure that whatever it is, it's supported by OS X, because Apple built the box.
If you were to buy a box that was built expressly for Linux -- and assuming the builders are doing a decent job -- then you could expect the same thing.
Now the next big problem that needs resolution. A reasonable way to handle printers.
For some reason I very seldom print -- I've given up on my inkjet because the heads invariably dry out in the months between my needing to print -- and for this reason it's a very long time since I've configured a printer under Linux, back in the days when tinkering with lpr was pretty representative of the whole Linux experience.
I understand that lpr has been dropped for CUPS. Isn't CUPS also used in OS X -- indicating that at least one corporation widely considered to have cracked ease of use, thinks it's good enough.
Explain?
Apple is certainly /a/ Dark Side. I recently bought a Mac Mini to reaquaint myself with what Apple has to offer. I knew at the time that at the end of the day Apple's number one commitment is to it's shareholders, but blimey the OS X/iLife experience is just so commercial.
.Mac. Your USB webcam doesn't work? Why not buy an iSight?
It's as if you can't open a menu without a "BUY ITUNES MUSIC" or "BUY GARAGEBAND ACCESSORIES" options being thrust in your face. You can't move for invitations to pay stump up more cash for
After years as primarily a Linux user, it's quite a shock to the system moving into an environment where I'm constantly being reminded of my status as a consumer.
Not sure you are correct. If you zoom out two levels, you see blocks and blocks of perfectly right angle rectangular city blocks.
This is because those blocks are oriented perpendicular to the compass points, so stretching the map East-West doesn't affect the angles.
I don't see it as a big deal: the only perfect map projection is a globe, and my monitor's flat.
Just buy a damn mouse already if you want the extra buttons, I'm currently writing this from a mac with a 4 button scroll wheel mouse *gasp!!* and it works just peachy.
It depends on the application. Try using the right button in GarageBand, for example: it does precisely nothing -- even in places where Command-click does something special. I find it pretty frustrating.
It's nice that the OS recognises multi-button mice, but since developers must support users with only one button, it seems pretty arbitrary as to what scraps they throw to users with a grown-up's mouse.
The average consumer is a moron and probably shouldn't be allowed to own a "complex" device which doesn't provide them with simple pictures to show them how to perform such difficult tasks as opening a case and replacing a battery that is as simple to replace as it is to replace a battery in a cordless phone.
If you didn't know how to swim, then you shouldn't have gone in the water in the first place!
You're as mad as a hatter -- or a troll.
An iPod is not marketed as a device for geeks. It's actively advertised as something non-technical for everyone.
One of the biggest thrills of F1 is the unbelievable amount of noise those cars make. How dull would it be if they were silent?
I went go-karting at a track with electric cars (this one) the other week.
At first the quietness felt really weird, but those things went faster than any karts I've been in before, and had awesome acceleration. To hear the air rushing through your helmet (rather than the roar of the engine) is quite something. Of course, the squealing of brakes and of tyres is unaffected.
The answer: yes, macs support multi-button mice.
The OS knows which button you've pressed, but application support for the right/middle button is patchy, because developers have to assume the user may have a single button mouse.
In Garageband, one might expect right-clicking a track to bring up a context menu (duplicating some of the options in the "Track" menu). One might expect right-clicking on a loop to do something similar. Instead, right clicking either does precisely nothing.
In iPhoto, right-clicks do what someone used to context menus might expect.
In Mac Firefox, the middle button doesn't open-in-new-tab, like it does on other platforms (yet on Safari it does).
Not consistent.
I recently bought a BenQ wireless keyboard/mouse set, and all in all I'm very pleased with it. We have a very small home office area, with a small desk, and having a wireless keyboard/mouse makes it very easy to tidy off the desk in order to do non-computing work (my S.O. does a lot of paper-heavy exam marking work).
I've not encountered any problems, although playing with GarageBand, I've noticed some latency when using the keyboard as a music keyboard -- so it's probably not too good for games either. Neither of these is a big deal for me, and for typing and general computer use it's fine.
> Which they then set alight
And it says this where, exactly?
Why would you fill a tube with petrol if you weren't intending to set it alight?
Why would you end up in a specialist burns unit if the petrol hadn't got lit?
[...]Steve doesn't sell music[...]
Um, he does.
iPodder (currently what one might describe as a "reference implementation" of a podcast client) already supports torrents as RSS enclosures.
My guess is that most podcasters don't use it because of the massive number of potential downloaders for whom bittorrent might not work because of office firewalls, home NAT routers, etc.
Other options: archive.org will host your Creative Commons media for free; using a Coral cache may reduce your bandwidth usage.
I'm not sure I get it either. When do I listen to audio-only entertainment? Either when I'm in the car or at work. At work, I need music, not news or verbal entertainment. In the car, I have a sirius radio, which is commercial free. I have quite a few channels to listen to and I enjoy being programmed to so I can find out new things without customizing my entire life's intake. At home, I just can't see taking time out for audio content.
Newsflash! Not everyone is like you. "The world don't dance to the beat of just one drum", and thank God for that.
I hate to carp on about the BBC's podcasts, but these are programmes I used to enjoy listening to, but rarely got around to because I either had to be by a Internet connected computer (to stream an archive), or use traditional radio and be tied to a specific time. Now I get the content delivered to my portable player with no fuss, and that's great. Sorry, but pasting a URL into a podcast client is way more convenient than messing around with Streamripper.
And, if you can find it, there are some gems in the amateur content too.
But, if it's not for you, that's fine. Go ahead and enjoy your music, your TV and your games. Just as I'm allowed to "not get" Halo and OOP, you're allowed to "not get" Podcasting. It doesn't mean all three of those things aren't huge.
A lot of posts seem to be deriding podcasting as being purely the audio equivalent of a personal blog. While there are certainly plenty of such podcasts, there's plenty of professionally produced material (the BBC output is just one example), and enough high-quality amateur stuff to fill the average person's commute.
The problem is the same problem mp3.com had (and Creative Commons/etc. music still has) -- when you've got a massive morass of mixed quality media, how is the consumer supposed to know what to try out and what to skip? With text you can skim-read, and sort that way. With audio, the selective process is more time consuming and pretty much impractical.
iPodder.org has a directory which has exactly the same problem as mp3.com. PodcastAlley tries to solve this by collating votes, but this just ends up promoting an "elite" of mainstream content, which only helps the mainstream consumer.
I don't know how to solve this, but there there is some promise: Adam Curry's show contains a lot of promos for other shows, and that's a good way to hear about podcasts you may wish to try out. I guess that's the next best thing to word of mouth.
After all, how do you decide what TV shows to watch? Trailers, reviews in the media, and word-of-mouth, right?
BBC is often hailed as the pinnacle of independent jounralism but I find their broadcasts have a very condescending patronizing bias when they report from "lesser" places such as Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa. Somehow, CBC manages to bring lots of news from all over the world while avoiding that annoying condescending tone that permeates the Beeb.
You don't state that you're Canadian, and your email address isn't public so there's no clues there.
But assuming you are, or at least that you're not English, is it possible you're detecting condescention in the "received pronunciation" English accent, where really there is none?
It's common enough -- no wonder Englishmen are so often cast as villains in Hollywood films.
While I'm sure these are terrific shows, it seems a shame that the for the pilot they chose "geek" shows. It's like the profiled the "kind of people who might manage this tricky technology", narrowly profiled their interests, and gave them something targeted to that stereotype.
I love the way the BBC's trial is wide-ranging in the scope of its programming: there's sport, film review, current affairs, history, documentary, as well as science and technology.
By podcasting "In Our Time" (sample topic: Imperialism and Archaeology), the BBC potentially brings tech geeks to history, and history geeks to technology, broadening everyone's horizons.
How much more mac does there need to be in the world?
Podcasting requires neither Mac, iTunes nor iPod.
Any MP3 player will do, and it's in the RSS that the magic lies.
There are key differences between podcasting and archival:
(1) A podcast is not necessarily kept available long term.
(2) A podcast is meant to "magically" appear on your portable MP3 player as part of your routine syncing/charging activity.
I don't like the name either -- it wrongly implies reliance on an iPod, and gives Apple free marketing -- but I think we're pretty much stuck with it now.
A cursory browse through the links in the article, and a couple of clicks beyond, does not explain to me how this works.
In the standard Adsense service, one puts a snippet of Javascript in one's pages, which the browser runs to fetch ads. The ads are targetted using what Google knows about the referrer URL, and the browser's IP address.
I don't believe many RSS aggregators will do anything with embedded Javascript in an RSS feed, so how does Google add ads to a feed? Does this only work on feeds hosted by Google?
It's the classic question. [ ... ] How do you compile "gcc"?
Traditonally one "bootstraps" a compiler with minimal reliance on other tools:
- implement compiler A, providing 1% of language features, in hand-made machine code
- write compiler B, providing 10% of langauge features, using the features provided by compiler B
- use compiler B to compile compiler C, which supports a greater subset of the language
- until finished
OTOH, the GCC install docs do list a C compiler as a prerequisite...
She said the scene would have made Orwell proud.
So what's wrong with detecting and prosecuting tax avoiders?
By only beef with the TV license situation is that alongside much excellent output, the BBC seems to spend an inordinate amount of time broadcasting either fluff or blatant promotional stuff for commercial pop music.
Given the BBC's previous experiments with transmissions in OGG format, and their continued development of a video codec free of patent encumberances, I'd be very surprised if it was Windows only.
Those Ogg trials were abandoned and the BBC continues to use Real as it's primary audio distribution method.
OTOH, the podcasting experiment, using MP3s and RSS at least show willing.
I was disappointed at first to see that the BBC is implementing DRM but it's worth bearing in mind that not all the content broadcast by the BBC is owned by them. Much of it comes from independent studios who license it to the BBC. So I remain hopeful that the BBC will offer its own copyrighted material to UK license payers on more permissive terms.
The BBC makes a lot of money from DVD/Video sales, as well as selling content internationally.
I expect the BBC will be looking to DRM to allow them to run this service without putting either of those two revenue streams in too much peril.